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Facebook founder returns to Harvard to recruit

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. (AP) - Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg left
Harvard University as a dropout with a novel idea. He returned
Monday with a triumphant message: He's hiring.

The 27-year-old CEO received a rock-star welcome during his
first official visit since he left for California's Silicon Valley
in 2004. He made his recruitment pitch to 250 students at Harvard
after a similar meeting at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.

"We're just getting started," he told reporters and a few
hundred students who gathered at the Harvard campus to catch a
glimpse of the Internet pioneer. "The next five or 10 years are
going to be about all the different products and industries that
can be rethought."

So many students turned out to see the sweatshirted billionaire
outside a university library that campus officials had to set up
temporary barriers to separate him from his audience.

Aaron Perez, an 18-year-old freshman from Poughkeepsie, N.Y.,
said Zuckerberg's creation was one of the reasons he chose to study
computer science. He said he's encouraged to hear that companies
are hiring computer programmers in today's struggling economy.

"It's an empowering story, especially these days," said Perez,
who risked being tardy to rowing practice to see Zuckerberg. "It
makes it seem like I've got a chance."

Harvard computing officials were working on their own
university-wide online directory when Zuckerberg created Facebook
as a campus-only social network. The then-sophomore told the campus
newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, it was silly that the university
needed years to create the site.

"I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week,"
he said.

An earlier Zuckerberg creation, Facemash, almost led to his
expulsion after he hacked university computers for student photos.

But there were no hurt feelings Monday, as university officials
and faculty welcomed Zuckerberg back to campus for the official
visit. Zuckerberg has returned to Harvard before on informal
recruiting trips.

"There are relatively few tech rock stars whose names are known
by people all over the world," said Harvard computer science
professor David Malan, who cited Microsoft's Bill Gates and Apple's
Steve Jobs as two other examples. "He really is in that
category."

Zuckerberg said his company has plans to expand and needs
talented workers to do it.

"There's a lot of really smart people here and a lot of them
are making decisions about where they're going to work," he said
of his decision to recruit in Cambridge.

The company's base of operations moved to Palo Alto, Calif., in
June 2004, just months after Facebook began to expand outside of
Harvard. By the end of the year, the site would have nearly 1
million users. Facebook says it now has more than 800 million
active users around the world and 3,000 employees.

It could someday open an office in the Boston area, Zuckerberg
said.

The area's status as a center for technological innovation has
improved in the last several years, local entrepreneur Dharmesh
Shah said. Shah is chief technology officer and co-founder of
HubSpot, a marketing software company, and also runs a blog devoted
to technology startups.

Shah created HubSpot while an MIT student and said he considered
basing his new company in San Francisco but wanted to stay close to
MIT and the area's growing talent pool.

"There's a vibrant ecosystem here," he said. "There's always
been this stereotype that startups on the East Coast won't take as
much risk as the startups you see on the West Coast, and that held
us back. But it's changing. I've never seen it as vibrant as it is
right now."

News that Zuckerberg was on campus spread Monday by word of
mouth, Twitter and, of course, Facebook. Students held their
smartphones aloft to snap photos as he walked through the campus.

Harvard student Madeline Halimi of Brooklyn, N.Y., said
Zuckerberg's story is encouraging, but also a little daunting. The
freshman student is still deciding her field of concentration.

"What's really weird is wondering whether the person next to
you will be the next person to invent something that changes the
world," Halimi said.